Overview

I was trying to download a file on my Mac and realised that there is no wget for Mac. Since I consistently use wget I decided to find a way to get wget for mac. I found a quick way to create an fake wget command by creating an alias of curl. By creating the alias, I am able to call ‘wget’ and it will invoke curl -O in the background and download the file just as wget would have. This is a quick way to get wget for Mac.

Using Curl As A Wget For Mac Replacement

In order to create an alias of `wget` that will simply run the command curl -O I ran the command below:

echo 'alias wget="curl -O"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Now when i type ‘wget http://www.example.com’ it will download the url as you would expect from wget. As mentioned before, in the background it will be invoking curl to download the file. So when I run `wget`, it is actually executing curl -O to download the file as we won’t even notice the difference. Well maybe a small difference. But the end result is the same and your file is downloaded.

Example Using The Replacement wget For Mac

wget http://www.example.com/helloworld.html

The -O option to curl tells curl to save the URL as a file rather than displaying the source.